Saturday, May 8, 2010

I am a user of XP Tablet PC and is looking for a replacement. Over the last several years, I have monitored the feature set they built into each OS to support Tablet operation. One of the main demands, and I believe plenty others, are that it must have recognizers for other languages. For example, if the OS locale is English, it must have Asia hand writing recognizers.

People using XP Tablet PC and Vista, takes this for granted even as it is available for base model of Vista on a tablet PC.

So when the Windows 7 comes along with the much touted expanded International Support when I tested a Tablet PC running English Windows 7 Home Premium naturally I expect that I could just add the Chinese recognizer and be able to interpose English writings with Chinese characters. Sadly, Microsoft take 2 steps forward and 4 steps back encouraged by pure greed to deny their customers this supports from the past.

While all the languages are available via keyboard inputs for all versions of Windows 7, hand writing recognizers for different languages are only available at the really top end of the spectrum:

Vista Home Premium customers could do handwriting recognition in up to 12 languages. In Windows 7 they will only get recognition for whatever Language Packs are installed (normally one language) and have no options for additional languages other than upgrading to Enterprise or Ultimate.

Home Premium customers will get the handwriting recognizer that corresponds to the language of their OS; i.e., a Swedish customer running Swedish Windows 7 will be able to use the Swedish handwriting recognizer. Enterprise and Ultimate customers can deploy additional recognizers by downloading the desired Language Packs and enabling the respective keyboards. The English recognizer is available to all Tablet PC customers on all SKUs.

New handwriting recognizers enable more people around the world to take advantage of handwriting recognition. If you have some type of pen input device, you have access to handwriting input. In fact, you can use your mouse as a rudimentary input device.

With this kind of pricing policy Microsoft sends a clear message that she is more interested in money grabbing than to provide a truly affordable multi-lango tablet market. No wonder the tablet market is dwindling aided by Microsoft's greedy policy. Its downfall is not so much caused by technical issues but rather scuttled by its creator through greed.

"New handwriting recognizers enable more people around the world to take advantage of handwriting recognition." Not likely with that kind of greedy and backward policy.